Wednesday, June 26, 2013

What Motivates the GOP?

You would think there are probably no more sympathetic figures on the planet than starving children, wouldn’t you? Yet Republicans in the US House of Representatives voted down reauthorization of the farm bill, containing the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, better known as food stamps, whose primary beneficiaries are ... starving children! The R’s did so under the guise of fiscal responsibility, but that’s a smokescreen. One only has to look at other areas where there’s no such convenient excuse to find out what their true motivations are.

Take gay marriage, for example. It costs nobody a nickel one way or another whether gays are allowed to marry, but Republicans don’t want to let them.

Or Gitmo. Independent commissions have found that there’s no reason to hold half the people we’ve got locked up there. Many of them were just average citizens who were denounced to the authorities by nabors who held grudges. But what happens once we’ve got them under lock and key in Cuba? Republicans won’t let us free them. They won’t let us charge them. They won’t let us try them. They won’t let us bring them to America. They won’t even let them starve themselves to death. And this is clearly costing us money, not saving it.

A woman is pregnant with her rapist’s child and wants an abortion. First, tho, Republicans insist that she go thru a second rape, but this time delivered by a nice, friendly doctor with a sterile medical dildo, which is soooo much better than the first time, even if medically totally unnecessary. And another additional expense. (But the GOP doesn’t want to pay for it with government funds, of course, so here’s your bill, ladies.)

Or immigration. Kids who’ve lived in this country their entire lives and have never known another can gain citizenship under the new, “enlightened” Republican approach, but only after they’ve done a dozen-year ground-glass crawl thru hard work, suffering, humiliation, uncertainty, and constant trepidation. Oh, and maybe not then, either, if extraneous factors completely outside their control (like border fences) don’t work out exactly the way Republicans think they should. (Ha ha, only kidding!) This is twenty times more expensive than just fixing the broken immigration system in the first place.

Voter ID? A “solution” in search of a problem, it would cost more money to implement than the current system but would have the desired effect of keeping tens of thousands of college students, elderly folks, poor people, and even nuns from being able to vote.

So there you have several sterling examples of how frugality isn’t really the GOP’s prime concern.

What is, then? I think I’ve discovered their basic motivation: Whenever they have a choice between being mean to people or being kind, they always go for mean.